Don’t Take Any Action Hurriedly.

In our busy life, we see every one of us is running after some target. Sometime, some of us do not think about the propriety of the target even. We are running because some other is also running. Where? I do not know and he does not know. Perhaps he is copying me or I am copying him. We did not ask each other why we are running. When we reach at destination, we find that our efforts were not worth of that result. This is unplanned work. This is what we did hurriedly wasting a lot of our energy, resources and time.

We must restore ourselves, we must think over our working strategy more carefully and repeatedly, carefully examining all the relevant factors and problems arising and likely to arise, to arrive at some decision. Once we decide on some issue, we must determine to achieve that target. We should not get weak and helpless to give up. We witness that those who are weak commit suicide when they get unexpected results against their efforts. They do not re-examine themselves where they had not performed well. From a grown up perspective, it is a waste of a young life.

Not doing well in exams is certainly no reason to end our life. History proves that most successful people have not necessarily been academically brilliant. But, for students whose whole world is the exam at the moment, there seems no life beyond it. It’s only when you remove yourself from a situation and place yourself at a distance that things fall into the right perspective.

A lot of people give in to pressure when they break up with a partner. Even if they don’t take the drastic step of ending their lives, they may waste years in depression. And yet, life moves on. Some years later, comfortably wrapped in another relationship, they realize the futility of all that heartburn. If only they had been able to distance themselves from the situation then, how much simpler life would have seemed and how much less painful the transition.

Apart from the losers who give up, there are those who, under pressure, fight back like cornered animals, not caring whether they are biting or hurting an enemy or a friend. So badly affected are they by the situation that they forget how to distinguish between friend and foe and even start snapping at helping hands extended towards them. Again, if only they could step away and consider the situation in a larger context, life would seem so much better.

The pain of a moment, though deadening in its intensity, is but one blip when viewed on the larger canvas of an entire life. The trick of getting over the moment is to remove yourself from it. A friend talks of how whenever overpowered, she mentally imagines herself in another time and place. She looks down upon herself stuck in the situation from outside and suddenly finds everything so much more tolerable. When she is confronted by someone she finds overpowering and scary, say an overbearing boss, she tells herself he is just one human being in just one organization in this vast city, which again is just one city among thousands others in a world that is part of larger Universe…..

And, suddenly the overbearing guy in front of her has been reduced to such a puny status that he seems laughable! And once you can laugh at someone, your fear of him vanishes. So she manages to mentally elevate herself and reduce the fearsome guy who confronts her. The same logic can be applied to a situation as well.

Of course another friend gave this technique quite a laughably ridiculous turn when she shared a trick she had read she had read somewhere. When she feels overpowered by someone, all she does is imagine them naked –in the buff, in their pristine glory as the Good Lord sent them! That reduces the guy to nothingness right before her eyes!

One must admire such a fertile imagination, one that turns a feared person to an object of ridicule! When this happens, she confesses she is hard pressed to control her laughter and by now has completely overcome her fear and wriggled out of her corner with confidence!

And so, just a step back at the right time, a view from a distance can help make a situation look far better than it does when you surround yourself with it. Life is bound to have its ups and downs and so long as we know that one follows the other, we should be fine. There is no greater consolation than the age old “This too shall pass…”

It is therefore advisable that we must take action after thorough thinking and once decided, we must proceed on. If any wrong gets committed, we may feel that it has been a lesson to us and we should repeat in future and the consequences which are happening would pass in course of time.